WIN7 Home cannot access WIN7 Pro shares

i have a network with mostly WIN7 Home computers and one WIN7 Pro computer. we share files between all the computers, and all the shares work in both directions with one exception -- none of the Home computers can access the shares on the Pro computer. all the sharing options are identical on all machines, and all the user names/passwords match up. from a Home computer when you open "network" in windows explorer, you can see the Pro computer listed -- but when you go to open it, you get a "cannot access \\computername" error. and again, from the Pro computer, you can open shares on all the Home computers fine. it's just the Home-access-to-Pro share that doesn't work.

and here's what i find very odd -- you can't even PING the Pro computer. even with the firewall and anti-virus on the Pro computer turned completely off. wouldn't that seem to indicate a problem with the router?

correct, i'm using a workgroup configuration. and yes, all on the same subnet, all same workgroup names. as far as networking goes, they are all configured identically. all shares in both directions work fine between all pairs except for the one case of the home computers not being able to open files/folders on the pro computer.

pinging by IP address. have checked the router config and don't see anything there unusual -- pretty much all default settings. have tried using a static IP address, and that doesn't help. re-booted the router and still nothing. the computer in question has both wired and wi-fi adapters, so i tried enabling and connecting via wi-fi -- problem persists.

it does seem to me the problem has to be in the router -- even with all networking completely turned off and different workgroup and user names, the computer should still respond to a ping, right? but if it is the router, what in the world could it be that would allow that IP address to talk to other computers, but not allow other computers to talk to it?

Had a very similar issue to yourself. Long story short, the workaround that resolved my issue was mapping ALL of the shares (i.e. all shares on all machines) via the IP address rather than the machine name in the UNC paths (\\192.168.0.200\C$ for example) - maybe indicative of a DNS issue? (others suggested the availability of shares during Windows login) but I stopped looking once the workaround sorted things. Needless to say you will need to use static IP on all machines if you want to give it a try - if memory serves, this issue started after a M$ update and subsequent reboot some time ago.

Also found MS HomeGroups appeared to cause similar issues when some machines (for what reason I have no idea!) got automatically added to a HomeGroup - I hasten to add I never intentionally use HomeGroups. Setting all machines Network location to 'Work Network' rather than 'Home Network' disables HomeGroups.

at one point i actually started down that path, but never fully implemented it on all shares on all machines because it seemed to me that given the fact that the Home computers can't even PING the Pro computer by IP address, that idea was never going to work. the core issue here i would think is the fact that none of the computers on the network can see the Pro computer, period. it's just not responding by IP address to anything. and yet somehow the UNC name of the Pro computer is showing up in the "network neighborhood" for all the other computers -- which leads me to believe that the DNS is working and it's something else that is blocking the traffic.

Do you have a standalone hub or switch you could wire the 'Pro' machine and 1 or 2 'Home' machines to? Trying this setup should allow you to pinpoint or eliminate the router as the issue and hence narrow the search, and would be quick and easy to test.

that's next on the list to try -- right now the users are apparently content to just work around the problem. at some point, though, i really want to get to the bottom of this, as i've never quite seen anything like this before.